3of3Actress Mary Kate Morrissey (pictured) stars as Elphaba — AKA the Wicked Witch of the West — in the national tour of “Wicked.” The hit musical looks at what was happening in Oz before Dorothy dropped in.
8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays and 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Thursdays through Oct. 14, Majestic Theatre, 224 E. Houston. $50 to $165 at the box office and at ticketmaster.com. Info, majesticempire.com.
Deborah MartinPhoto: Joan Marcus

When Ginna Claire Mason was 13-years-old, she joined her dad on a business trip in New York, where the concierge at their hotel suggested that they check out a new show on Broadway.

“The concierge didn’t know she was changing a little girl’s life,” Mason said in a telephone interview.

The show was “Wicked.” And Mason — who had been so taken with “The Wizard of Oz” that she wept when the family left an exhibit devoted to the film during a trip to Las Vegas when she was 4 or 5 — was instantly smitten.

Elphaba is the headlining role — the idea behind the show and the novel that it’s based on is that it provides the back story for the character, who was once better known solely as the Wicked Witch of the West. But Mason wanted to play Glinda — a dream she is now living, as she is playing the good witch in the national tour of “Wicked.”

The show is returning to the Majestic Theatre, launching the 2018-’19 season of the Broadway in San Antonio series.

“Elphaba’s definitely cool, but I grew up with three brothers,” Mason said. “I went through a tomboy stage, but in middle school, I probably started feeling like I wanted to assert more of my femininity, so I was instantly drawn to the bubble (in which Glinda makes her entrance) and the songs and the character itself.

“Now years later, I am continually drawn to her and to the fact that she has such a beautiful arc in the story. She’s such a satisfying character to play.”

One of the central threads in the show is the complex relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, who start out as rivals when they meet in school and gradually become BFFs.

Mason and Mary Kate Morrissey, who plays Elphaba, have become close offstage, too.

“We joke that we were ‘insta-friends,’ but there’s something really special about it,” Mason said. “The first time we sang ‘For Good’ together, you look into someone’s eyes and sing those words, you feel a bond. We have a special friendship onstage and off.”

Both actresses bear some similarities to their characters, Morrissey said.

“She’s Glinda in real life,” she said of Mason. “She’s bubbly and loving and all that, and I’m dry. We are totally yin and yang. I never thought I’d have a friend like her.”

Like Mason, she first saw “Wicked” on Broadway when she was in middle school. And she responded to the show and to the role she would one day play in a way akin to how her character might have.

“It’s always something that people told me I was going to do and I never believed that it would actually happen,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’ll never be good enough; they’ll never cast me as that.’”

Both women got to know the roles they now call their own intimately while they worked as understudies for the show. When Morrissey was understudying, she said, she felt a growing desire to play the role full-time. So she trained for it, working with a vocal coach and really pushing to play the part on tour.

The role has been meaningful for her. She knows that there are moments in the show that are meaningful for others, too, and she takes the responsibility that comes with that seriously. She keeps that in mind every time she sings “Defying Gravity,” the song during which Elphaba first takes flight and voices her decision that she’s “through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game.”

“It’s so anthemic,” Morrissey said. “I think that when people see Elphaba fly, they can see themselves overcoming whatever they need to — they have that power, too. I always try to think of marginalized communities, people that have a lot of prejudice against them — LGBTQ people, trans people, people of color, immigrants. If they’re seeing this show, I want them to see me lifting them. That’s what I always think of.”

The song is just one of the many vocally demanding numbers in the show. Mason has a few of those, too. And so, between performances, the actresses tend to hang out together, preserving their energy. They sip tea, steam their voices and watch “The Great British Baking Show” on Netflix.

They both make it a point to spend at least a little time exploring in each city the tour visits. They’re both looking forward to getting out a bit in San Antonio, where Morrissey has some family and Mason hopes to revisit spots she saw during a trip when she was a kid.

One day, they both hope to retrace this tour together in a way that will allow them to venture out more.

“My dream is to write a little show and tour it to all the cities we’ve been to so that people who fell in love with us onstage can see us again,” Morrissey said. “Then we can spend a couple of days seeing those cities. That’s my big dream that I want to happen in 2019.”

Deborah Martin is an arts writer who came to work for the San Antonio Express-News in 1999. She writes primarily about theater – she sees around 100 shows annually -- and helps oversee the paper’s coverage of the fine performing arts. Her first newspaper job was with the El Paso Herald-Post, where she worked as a general assignment reporter before becoming arts and entertainment editor. After the Herald-Post closed, she spent just over a year covering the arts for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times before coming to the Express-News. She has a degree in journalism from UT El Paso, and was a fellow in the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater at the University of Southern California in 2007.